How It Started...

I was 6 in 1986, and Tuesday afternoons rocked. As long as I had behaved that week, my Mom would pull me out of school for a lunch date at Chuck E. Cheese's. As a way to generate more business, this particular Chuck E. Cheese's would set all the games to free play during weekday lunches, which meant that I could play as many games as time allowed! While there were many cool games at this particular location, I always seemed to gravitate towards the blinking lights and plastic NASA spaceship in William's Space Shuttle pinball (that and the Atari Star Wars cockpit, which I also restored here: http://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/1984-atari-star-wars-cockpit-restore).

When I turned 8, we moved and I never saw another Space Shuttle again...until 2011.

I picked it up for $800 but knew nothing about pins at the time. I quickly realized that it needed some TLC. It played just fine, but the playfield had a lot of "touchups," which basically amounted to black magic marker and scotch tape. As a result, I pulled the trigger on a CPR repro playfield and completely rehabbed the game (in retrospect, I definitely put too much money into that game, but now it played and looked practically brand new!).

After a few months of owning Space Shuttle, I started to recall a different pin that I loved to play in junior high: Whirlwind! I remembered the rush of having the fan blow onto my face, and couldn't resist picking up another beater. $800 later and I had my machine #2: WW. Again, I went the CPR route and wound up with a gorgeous, practically NIB machine (this time, I made sure to document my project, which can be seen here: http://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/whirlwind-cpr-playfield-swap#post-892052).

By this time, I knew I was bit. Rehabbing these games was such a joyful and nostalgic experience for me!

My next game: Taxi. I felt blessed to find one for...$800! It was in rough shape, but played. This time however, I didn't want to replace the playfield but try my hand at touching it up.

This proved to be my toughest challenge yet and while I definitely wouldn't say this one turned out looking NIB, I'm proud of what I was able to do on my first attempt. Most of the tips were provided by the awesome community of Pinsiders. The cab turned out great, as did all the electronics. Using an airbrush on the playfield was just more challenging than I had originally thought!

As I continue to pursue this ridiculous hobby, I'm incredibly grateful for a wife who's cool with all this, and the community that Pinside provides. I'm meeting many new friends through local pinball events, and playing all sorts of great games that I never had the chance to play when they first came out. My biggest challenge now is finding space for all the games on my "want" list.

Since this all started at Chuck E. Cheese's, I guess I'll blame that gigantic mouse. Who knows? Perhaps my next step in this hobby will be buying a bunch of animatronic animal characters that play and sing music! At that point, I guess I might as well buy a pizza oven too...